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Rescuing Social Work in City Schools

Elderly couple’s million dollar donation will help create better learning environment

Bay Area social work veteran Diana Ming Chan, right, and her husband Clarence have donated their life savings — with matching funds from the SFUSD — to create the Learning Springboard, a program to bring social services back to the city's public schools. Photo by Neela Banerjee.

By Neela Banerjee

Seventy-one-year-old Diana Ming Chan has spent her entire career working with children and families in and around San Francisco — from heading up the Family Service agency in Chinatown to working as a counselor in schools. Now, she and her husband Clarence are rejuvenating the school social work program by donating their life savings to start a progressive new program in San Francisco’s public schools.

Ever since voters passed a 1978 statewide ballot measure that capped the increase in property taxes to 1 percent per year, funding for many health and human services have been cut, especially in schools.

Before 1978, San Francisco elementary schools employed social workers to counsel children who seemed to have trouble adjusting to their environment or who were experiencing barriers to academic achievement. School social workers facilitated learning support programs and assisted these children toward a more positive educational experience. But these programs and school social work jobs were quickly phased out due to funding restrictions.

“A school social worker works with a student in a preventative and healing way,” Chan said. Typically Chan would get to know students who may have had problems and observe them in a peer and classroom situation. Chan would then work with the student, the student’s family and teacher to bring about a positive change.

“Teachers today are already overworked and just do not have the time to attend to the needs of children who require extra attention,” she said.

Chan retired from a 30-plus year career in social work in 1999, the last 10 of which were spent in the San Francisco Unified School District. She and her husband really wanted to do something that would change the system as it was, and with the help of their son Harrison Leong, they came up with the idea for the Learning Springboard program.

The program’s mission is to create an emotionally positive learning environment so children can tap into their natural motivation and ability to learn. The rationale behind it has to do specifically with how emotional troubles can negatively impact a child’s ability to learn and how it can develop into more serious and destructive behaviors.

“We didn’t want to just give money over to the school for them to employ social workers, though,” Chan said. This is why they went through the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), an organization to which Chan has belonged for many years.

The Chans are creating an endowment fund of $500,000 within the Social Workers National Research and Education Fund and the school district plans to match this donation to create a permanent fund within the district. The fund will be used to hire starter position to supervise a unit of graduate level social work interns from a local university.

“That way we are getting social workers in the school and helping with the education of these graduate students,” Chan said. “And then perhaps some of these graduate students will come back and work in the schools after earning their degrees.”

The Chans plan to add an additional $500,000 in the next few years to enable the SFUSD to hire more social workers and expand the program.

Final details of the program are still being worked out with the school district but Chan and the NASW plan to implement this program by next September.

“At first we thought of putting our savings into a fund that would be donated to a good cause after we passed away,” Chan said. But after Chan approached the school board to inquire about the school social work program and saw that the real problem was lack of funding, she realized that she wanted to be actively involved and decided to “put my money where my mouth is.”

The Chans and their son were recently honored at a NASW sponsored luncheon held in Chinatown attended by Bay Area social workers, school district officials and Supervisor Sue Bierman.

“This contribution is more than generous, it is an insightful act of leadership,” NASW California chapter President Jeff Jue said to the Chans. “You have planted a big seed and left a big legacy.”

Bierman later introduced the Chans at the Board of Supervisor’s meeting and promised to push through a resolution that would help get the Learning Springboard program underway.